Pronounced "Nice-us"

File Format Redux

There was a day when every word processor had its own format. The reason developers did this was to “lock” you in to using their software. The idea was that once you had all your documents stored in their proprietary format, you would have to keep buying the same software to read your documents.

But Mark recently pointed out to me that actually Nisus chose its original format specifically to avoid locking people into our format:

Actually we settled on TEXT so than *anyone* could read our documents. You might have lost the formatting, but, that did not affect the actual text. Innumerable people chose Nisus Writer Classic specifically because it stored the text as TEXT!.

The way the Nisus Writer Classic file format handles formatting was truly clever. So, I guess we’ve always had a tradition of helping our users share their files with others.

1 response so far ↓

As a writer who needs to produce MSS which publishers can read, the ability to convert to RTF is essential – so long as it still reads the Hebrew I put in! (And the photos.) So many want Word, but I prefer Nisus as it supports Hebrew and has excellent writing tools, such as footnotes, indexing, and word counts with reading level.

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